Microsoft is hosting an online Firestarter event for the Azure platform. The event is Tuesday, April 6th from 11:30 AM-8:00 PM (EST). It looks like it has a pretty good line up of presenters including doing a Cloud Cover episode “live”. Take a look and get registered if you are interested. Learn about the cloud…in the cloud.

Many times it’s the little things that make life easier. For people who practice TDD (Test Driven Development) with Visual Studio here is a common scenario that can be an annoyance: You’re writing your test and need to create an instance of a class, but that the class doesn’t exist yet. So you type: SomeClass test = new SomeClass(); Now, as you’re typing this the Visual Studio Intellisense tries to be very helpful, but the class just doesn’t exist yet so it gets confused.

I ran into something this week that was very unexpected: the SQL Server implementation of substring does NOT work like the substring implementation I’m use to in .NET (or really any other language I’ve run into). While this .Net Nugget is really for TSQL, it did stand out as a difference from how .NET does it so I thought it was worth mentioning. The docs on SQL Server say this: